Two stories in the news today about climate change and what we might be able to do about. First, on the political front, we now have the text of the complete bill now making its way through the Senate.

Senator Barbara Boxer released a 923-page draft of the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act over the weekend, the Senate version of climate and energy legislation, for the first time specifying emissions allocations and costs proposed in the bill.

“We’ve reached another milestone as we move to a clean energy future, creating millions of jobs and protecting our children from dangerous pollution,” Boxer, chairperson of the Environmental and Public Works Committee, who wrote the bill with Senator John Kerry, said on Friday.

In terms of emissions allocation, the Senate bill in many respect mirrors provisions in the House version passed last summer (H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.)

There are links in the original that will take you to the complete texts of both the House and Senate bills as they are now configured. The other news indicates that focusing on emissions from energy plants, industry, and automobiles could be only about half of the solution.

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the lifecycle and supply chain of animals raised for food account for 51% of annual emissions caused by humans and should be given higher priority in global efforts to fight climate change, World Bank Group experts argue.

The authors recognise that the 51% figure put forward “is a strong claim that requires strong evidence,” but stress that if their argument is right, “it implies that replacing livestock products with better alternatives” would have far more rapid effects on the climate than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

This partly due to significant reductions in the amount of methane, produced by enteric fermentation from cattle. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation, 37% of human-induced methane comes from livestock. Although methane produced by enteric fermentation from cattle warms the atmosphere much more strongly than CO2, its half-life in the atmosphere is only about eight years, compared to at least 100 years for CO2.

Before anyone decides that what this means is that animals are just as responsible for greenhouse gases as we are, consider this:

“Livestock (like automobiles) are a human invention and convenience, not part of pre-human times, and a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe,” they state.

Another factor involved is the amount of forest land cut down and cleared to make pastures for grazing animals. That not only releases CO2 from the soil, it reduces the forest’s capacity for removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

What this all makes apparent is that climate change is a global problem not only in the geographical sense, but also in the sense that it’s a consideration in our entire lives, from the cars we drive, the way we heat our homes and light our cities, even to the kinds of food we eat and how it’s grown. The bills now working their way through Congress are focused on energy and transportation, maybe it’s time to get the Agriculture Committee involved, too.

And Congress hasn’t even passed a law yet.

The United States has ended a century of rising carbon emissions and has now entered a new energy era, one of declining emissions. Peak carbon is now history. What had appeared to be hopelessly difficult is happening at amazing speed.

For a country where oil and coal use have been growing for more than a century, the fall since 2007 is startling. In 2008, oil use dropped 5 percent, coal 1 percent, and carbon emissions by 3 percent. Estimates for 2009, based on U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) data for the first nine months, show oil use down by another 5 percent. Coal is set to fall by 10 percent. Carbon emissions from burning all fossil fuels dropped 9 percent over the two years.

Add in future stronger requirements in automobile emissions, more efficient building techniques, and a recession influenced drop in individual energy use and there’s actually reason to believe that meaningful cuts in emissions, the kind needed to at least slow down the pace of global warming, can be achieved. Something to feel good about as a new week begins.

We’ve already seen the announcements of advances in technology designed to capture CO2 emissions from coal plants, now comes support for that approach from Energy Secretary Steven Chu:

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced today that $55 million will be made available to develop advanced technologies that can capture carbon dioxide from flue gases at existing coal-fired power plants. This would allow the greenhouse gas they would otherwise emit into the atmosphere to be sequestered or put to beneficial use.

The funding announced today is a direct investment in carbon capture and storage related technologies that will support the Obama administration’s effort to help moderate the effects of CO2 – a major greenhouse gas and contributor to global climate change.

Note that Chu’s announcement is aimed at technology for existing coal plants. Now compare that to this statement from a coal industry spokesperson:

The nation’s largest industrial trade association issued a statement in support of the $55 million investment announced today.

“Building large-scale, near-zero-emissions power plants will support the continued economic viability of our nation’s manufacturing base, create high-wage sustainable jobs, and continue to improve our global environment,” said Keith McCoy, vice president for energy and resources policy of the National Association of Manufacturers.

Mr McCoy’s statement is obviously aimed at building new plants, not modifying existing ones. Secretary Chu may talk about CO2 sequestration technology as lowering pollution from existing plants, but the industry itself is going to see it as an excuse to build new plants, and continue our reliance on coal, the dirtiest, most destructive form of fossil fuel that we currently employ. If Chu and the Obama Administration don’t watch out, their plan to clean up coal will turn in to a plan to burn more and more of the stuff, at the expense of the environment and any plans we might have to come up with an alternative that doesn’t mean burning more coal.

Two developments today in the effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and begin to combat the effects of climate change. First, legislation was introduced in the U.S. Senate today.

The United States today took a big step towards enacting legislation to combat global climate change.

U.S. Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Barbara Boxer of California, both Democrats, introduced the Kerry-Boxer bill, formally known as the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act to limit greenhouse gas emissons while putting Americans back to work.

The bill targets a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 from 2005 levels, stating that this is “the minimum scientists judge necessary to avert a climate disaster.”

Remember that legislation has already passed the House of Representatives. The Senate bill may be a little stricter than the House version, but it’s pretty comparable and is already attracting criticism from opponents, some arguing it goes too far, some not far enough.

Meanwhile, while Congress deliberates, the EPA keeps moving ahead on its own.

The Obama administration is not waiting for legislation governing greenhouse gas emissions to be approved by Congress, but is proceeding to regulate these gases under the Clean Air Act.

Large industrial facilities that emit at least 25,000 tons of greenhouse gases a year will have to obtain Clean Air Act construction and operating permits covering these emissions, under a proposal announced today by U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

A similiar rule requires the use of best available control technologies when industrial facilities add generating capacity under the New Source Review provisions of the Clean Air Act.

One thing to keep in mind here is that CO2 emissions are measured not in ounces or pounds or even hundreds of pounds. The standards involved are instead thousands of tons per power plant. That’s a lot of pollution, and while on one hand it points out the immensity of the problem, on the other it shows how much room there is for improvement.

Another thing to keep in mind is the irony that while climate change deniers like Senator James Inhofe do everything they can to block legislation, they open the door for the EPA to proceed with regulation.

While the talk everywhere else seems to be about building new coal-fired power plants, canada is in the process of closing an old plant down.

New Brunswick Power announced today that the company will close its coal-fired Grand Lake generating station when its operating license expires in June 2010. During the early years of the Great Depression, New Brunswick Power built the Grand Lake facility, the Atlantic province’s first thermal generating station.

As far as the environment goes, this is a two for one deal.

Opened in 1931, the Grand Lake Generating Station burns bituminous coal from nearby deposits on the shores of Grand Lake near the towns of Minto and Chipman. A NB Power subsidiary, NB Coal is the only mining company left in the Minto area and performs strip mining.

Because NB Coal’s only customer is the Grand Lake Generating Station, the strip mine will close this December.

Close the plant and shut down a strip mine. It doesn’t get much better than that. Unless you also factor in the reduction in emissions.

With the addition of federal initiatives, the plan will result in a reduction of New Brunswick’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels in 2012. (Environment Minister Rick) Miles said the achievement of these reductions will position New Brunswick to realize further reductions of 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Get ready to breathe cleaner air, people of New Brunswick.

The scariest thing about climate change and greenhouse gases and global warming and all that stuff is that it seems every time a new study comes out, the problem looks bigger, and is happening sooner.

Global temperatures may be 4 degrees Celsius hotter by the mid-2050s if current greenhouse gas emissions trends continue, said a study published on Monday.

The study, by Britain’s Met Office Hadley Center, echoed a U.N. report last week which found that climate changes were outpacing worst-case scenarios forecast in 2007 by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“Our results are showing similar patterns (to the IPCC) but also show the possibility that more extreme changes can happen,” said Debbie Hemming, co-author of the research published at the start of a climate change conference at Oxford University.

Leaders of the main greenhouse gas-emitting countries recognized in July a scientific view that temperatures should not exceed 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, to avoid more dangerous changes to the world’s climate.

Note that language. Reality is turning out to be worse than even the worst-case scenarios if just a few years ago. And, even as the problem becomes bigger and more immediate, politics, greed, and misinformation from the die-hard deniers prevents us from doing anything meaningful about it.

Die-hard is the right phrase here, because if the forces arrayed against doing anything about climate change have their way, that’s exactly what will happen. People will die. Judging from past human behavior, though, it will take a catastrophe for people to really wake up to the dangers. By then it could be too late, and we will have permanently altered the balance of air, water and temperature that defines the world’s climate.

Let’s see, so far we have possible action by the EPA, a bill making its way through Congress, can there be any other way to attack the problem of greenhouse gas emissions? How about the courts?

In a historic ruling, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has sided with states and private land trusts that sued large power companies to make them curb their greenhouse gas emissions.

A federal district court judge had dismissed their claims as being a political, not a judicial, issue.

But Monday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the power companies can be sued in federal court because their carbon dioxide emissions are a public nuisance that contributes to rising temperatures and other damaging impacts, such as heat waves, smog episodes, droughts and forest fires.

The appellate court held that federal courts are empowered to limit damaging carbon dioxide emissions unless and until the legislative and executive branches regulate that pollution, either under the existing Clean Air Act or the comprehensive new energy and climate legislation now working its way through Congress.

For those keeping score, the Second Court of Appeals is where Justice Sonia Sotomayor sat before moving up to the Supreme Court. She played no part in this decision, it was made by the other two judges on the appeals court.

This decision puts even more pressure on Congress to pass a bill. It’s the big polluters worst nightmare to find themselves ganged up on by a federal agency and the court system at the same time.

Those intent on denying human involvement in global warming often like to point to what natural causes that they feel explain away the phenomena. “It’s sunspots”, they’ll say, or “Shifts in the Earth’s orbit.”

Meanwhile, for climate scientists and the rest of us the evidence has been quite good for a while that global warming and climate change are being propelled by human activities like pollution from greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Now, as if we didn’t have enough evidence already, a new study just released shows that if it wasn’t for us, the Arctic would be cooling instead of melting.

Arctic temperatures have been dropping for the last 2,000 years. Since 1900, temperature anomaly has turned positive, indicating temperatures started becoming warmer than the long term average, new research indicates. The study, which incorporates geologic records and computer simulations, provides new evidence that the Arctic would be cooling if not for greenhouse gas emissions that are overpowering natural climate patterns. The Summer temperature anomaly changed from about — 1 to + 1 which is a very large change.

The international study, led by Northern Arizona University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), will be published in the September 4 edition of Science. It was primarily funded by the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor.

“This result is particularly important because the Arctic, perhaps more than any other region on Earth, is facing dramatic impacts from climate change,” says NCAR scientist David Schneider, one of the co-authors. “This study provides us with a long-term record that reveals how greenhouse gases from human activities are overwhelming the Arctic’s natural climate system.”

“If it hadn’t been for the increase in human-produced greenhouse gases, summer temperatures in the Arctic should have cooled gradually over the last century,” says Bette Otto-Bliesner, an NCAR scientist who participated in the study.

So there you have it. We are influencing the climate not just enough to cancel out a two millenium long cooling trend, but we’ve actually reversed the process. Anyone denying human responsibility for global warming can now do so only as a matter of stubborn, ignorant belief. it has nothing to do with science, or the facts.

Dow AgroSciences is a major supplier of pesticides and other chemicals to the agriculture industry. No doubt they do many good things, but it doesn’t sound like their latest product in development, sulfuryl fluoride, is one of them.

Public health and environmental advocates Friday asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to deny a request from Dow AgroSciences for a permit allowing it to release large amounts of sulfuryl fluoride onto farm fields in four states. The chemical is a toxic pesticide whose global warming effects are thousands of times stronger than carbon dioxide.

“The hazards of using sulfuryl fluoride in agriculture have not been evaluated. It is also 4,780 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide,” said Dr. Brian Hill, a staff scientist at the Pesticide Action Network. “Either one of those facts makes permitting these tests a major mistake.”

Here’s what Dow wants to do.

Dow AgroSciences proposes using sulfuryl fluoride to sterilize soil in farm fields. The permit would allow the release of 32,435 pounds of sulfuryl fluoride on 65 acres of test plots in Florida, Georgia, Texas, and California. Releasing just 10 percent of that amount into the air would be equivalent to releasing 15.5 million pounds of carbon dioxide. “A car that gets 30 miles per gallon would have to be driven 23 million miles — the distance of a trip circling the world over 930 times — to cause that much global warming,” said Hill.

Yes, farmers need pesticides, but there’s no reason sulfuryl flouride has to be one of them, and plenty good reasons for Dow to find something else.

California’s request for a waiver that would allow it to set its own, more stringent standards for emissions from cars and trucks, and which had been denied under the Bush Administration, has finally been approved by the EPA. That’s pretty good news by itself, but it’s actually bigger than one state’s request, there are plenty of others lined up waiting to follow California’s lead.

The EPA’s granting of the waiver request immediately clears the way for California and 13 additional states to require reductions in tailpipe emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. The Clean Air Act gives California special authority to enact stricter air pollution standards for motor vehicles than the federal government’s, but EPA must approve a waiver of federal standards before California’s rules can take effect.

When it comes to emission standards, california has kind of the same influence that Texas does in high school text books. Their decisions affect so many people that manufacturers and publishers are practically forced to adopt the state standard as a national standard. So it could very well be that the EPA’s grant of a waiver for California is in essence the first step in a stricter national standard for greenhouse gas emissions for the entire country.